Renal dysfunction or failure and, in particular, end-stage renal disease, causes the body to lose the ability to remove water and minerals and excrete harmful metabolites, maintain acid-base balance, and control electrolyte and mineral concentrations within physiological ranges. Toxic uremic waste metabolites including urea, creatinine, uric acid, and phosphorus accumulate in tissues, which can result in a person's death if the filtration function of the kidney is not replaced.
Dialysis can be used to replace kidney function by removing these waste toxins and excess water. Peritoneal dialysis is a type of dialysis treatment used to replace kidney function in which sterile, dialysis solution (dialysate) is infused into the peritoneal cavity of a patient. The peritoneal membrane serves as a natural dialyzer and toxic uremic waste metabolites and various ions diffuse from the patient bloodstream across the membrane into the dialysis solution. At the same time, water is drawn into the peritoneal cavity by an osmotic gradient. The dialysis solution can be removed, discarded, and replaced with fresh dialysis solution on a semi-continuous or continuous basis. Draining, discarding and replacing the large volumes of solution needed for peritoneal dialysis is inconvenient, unwieldy and expensive, especially for peritoneal dialysis treatment at home.
To address this problem, devices have been designed that reconstitute used dialysate from hemodialysis and/or peritoneal dialysis solution as opposed to discarding it. The dialysate can be regenerated in a machine utilizing a device that eliminates urea from the solution. Typically, the ion exchange resins used in devices such as the REDY® Sorbent System adsorb not only the urea degradation products, but also essential ions such as, for example, calcium and magnesium that have diffused into the dialysate. These ions then generally need to be replaced.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2011/0060273 A1, which is incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, describes a dialysate regeneration system that can be used at home and moved from one location to another. This system can operate continuously or semi-continuously during periods of dialysis to clear uremic waste metabolites from a patient with renal dysfunction or failure, without overly depleting the patient's body of essential ions, such as, for example, calcium and magnesium. An advantage of this dialysate regeneration system is that it provides patients with the option of a sorbent-based peritoneal dialysis system that can be conveniently used at home. Dialysate cleaning in the dialysate regeneration system enables the use of a much smaller volume of dialysate compared to single pass systems. Even with the portability of such a sorbent-based peritoneal dialysis machine, there exists a need for a machine that can be easily wearable and configured to accept convenient replacement components.